The box: In Memoriam

My dad arrived in the mail today.

A box.  I had to sign for him. 

The postal carrier was sweet—told me to focus on happy memories—and then handed me the box. The body. My dad’s ashes. How have we come to such a place where the dead are mailed? I received a box of books at the same time. Didn’t have to sign for them. People are more important than presents, but not so important they can’t be boxed and shipped—moved from holding facility to mail truck with no one knowing or caring what’s in the box. That’s my dad. Be gentle with him. 

And yet no need. He’s not there. It’s a box. It’s full of ash. I haven’t opened it yet, but I’ve seen other “cremains.” He’ll look like fine sand from an Oregon beach, some bigger bits poking out of the dust. He won’t be wearing his NEVADA suspenders or his dorky little glasses case that hung from his belt loop on a carabiner for as long as I remember him. No teeny agenda book in his breast pocket. No mustache. No glasses. No wedding ring. All those things I collected long ago, too early to appreciate them—they were surrounded with the bitterness of losing him to dementia, but still having to steward his body through the end. 

That transition complete now, I am gifted with a box of dad, and a strange freedom to reframe the objects I associate with him, to see them in light of real loss. Now he’s really gone.  Now I can’t even hold his hand or kiss his head or sing him “Stardust” anymore... I could sing to the box. 

But he’s not there. He’s not in the box. He’s in my head and in my heart and in some of my movements and some of my words. He’s in my children and he’s in the wind. I felt him at Yellowstone, hiking, when I learned of his death. I took him with me through Yellowstone’s canyons and meadows, looking for wildlife while the light lasted.

He’s in my pictures; that is certain.  He wanted to be a photographer, but the closest thing the University of Alaska offered to a photography degree in 1949 was chemistry. He took some classes, then he followed different passions.  But he took pictures all his life. He once lost his camera on a trip to Canada, and some stranger found and returned it, shipping it from British Columbia to Nevada at his own cost. I have rarely seen dad so happy as when he opened that box. When I bought myself a camera in college and then returned it (I really couldn’t afford it; returning it was a very responsible, adult thing to do), he bought me a camera for my graduation. And a case. And two lenses. And four filters. He was proud that I liked taking pictures too. But it wasn’t my driving passion either, but something to document with, to create, to express how we see or at least acknowledge the appreciation that both of us have for the world. 

There are other boxes to go through: boxes of slides, thousands of slides of the pictures he took. Now that he’s gone, I can go through them, and I’ll find him again, in what he found important enough to photograph and how he chose to frame it. I’ll see the world through his eyes, and I’ll have questions for him that no one will be able to answer. But in the questioning, there will be commerce. In the looking, there will be contact. And as with every time we try to see the world through another pair of eyes, there will be love.

In Defense of the Prose Poem, or The Existential Escargot

Every time I teach Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium, I buy another book he references in them. It’s like getting a reading list from a trusted source. Usually it’s another treasure I don’t know how else I would have stumbled across. Once, I admit, I didn’t see what he saw—I put down Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual after reading about half of it. But I’ve chased down others of his works and enjoyed them, so I still count him as a triumph.

One of my favorite discoveries was Francis Ponge. Ponge writes prose poems, which I adore. I’ve had many conversations defending this delicate art.  Ponge’s The Nature of Things (Le parti pris des choses) features in Calvino’s essay on “Exactitude” because Ponge is a master of exactitude. In the quest for “le mot juste,” he takes all the prizes. He describes objects and incidents with laser precision. I read one or two occasionally when I need a shot of beauty, like an inoculation against the dis-ease of the world.

In The Nature of Things, “Snails” is by far the longest piece--over four pages. It is quite striking throughout, but the end compels me to write (but first to quote).  He calls snails “saints.”

“That is the example that snails offer us: saints who make masterpieces of their lives, works of art of their own perfection. They secrete form. Nothing outside themselves, their necessity, or their needs is their work. Nothing is out of proportion with their physical being. Nothing that is unnecessary or obligatory.

“And so they delineate the duties of humanity: great thoughts come from the heart. Live a better life and make better verses. Morality and rhetoric combine in the ambition and desire of the wise.

“How are they saints? Precisely by obedience to their nature. So: know yourself. And accept yourself for what you are. In agreement with your vices. In proportion with your measure.

“What is most appropriate to the human being? Words. Decency. Our humanism.”

And he wrote this in Paris in 1936. So 350 years after Polonius told Laertes “To thine own self, be true” and 70 years before a rash of self-help books and articles in women’s magazines, here was some crazy Frenchman watching snails in his garden and thinking ‘Hey, we’re a lot alike!’ What a cool world we live in when meaningful connections can be made between such disparate entities, when patterns in the nature of things echo, or reverberate, or like images in a mirror, respond to each other.  The longer I live, the more I feel everything is connected.

And the advice is so beautiful:  Know yourself. Accept yourself. 1- in keeping with your vices, and 2- in proportion to your stature. So look honestly at yourself. Learn your weaknesses. He doesn’t say to stamp them out; just learn them. And understand your stature. I take that to mean we should acknowledge how we stand tall (our strengths, etc.) and how high we stand—to realize our position in relation to other things and people. Find your place. Plomb your depths and measure your heights. Then express yourself—all with a mind to perfecting yourself. At 17 I told a friend I was questing to create the perfect Alison, and he very gallantly asked me not to because he liked the current version fine. But who could ever stop? The point Ponge makes is that we must do it consciously every step of the way.

Discover our nature and live it. Well. Really well. Good luck out there.

(The Ponge text is taken from Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau's translation, available on the Poetry Foundation website:  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/89712/snails. The photo is of a little girl running toward self-actualization, faster than a snail or a stopped train.)

Cleaning the Writing Pipes

I have written academic prose for a number of years now—mostly about teaching, but also about literature. It is a mode I still don’t find natural, despite (cough) over two decades experience. I can do it, but it takes effort. When I argue, I do not sing.

Academic writing takes research and planning and more planning, and then writing, then revising, then editing. So does writing fiction. But somehow one feels like work to me, and one feels like play.

In fact, writing fiction feels so much like play that I haven’t let myself do much of it. I’ve needed to get a job, to get tenure, to get promoted, and fiction hasn’t figured in to that. And now that I have reached a point in my career when I can write what I want, I still put up roadblocks.

In the worst sort of self-sabotage, I now feel like I’ve built a career writing academically:  how will I remember how to write creatively? So here’s how I have done it—am doing it:

I’ve read books about being creative, and finding time to fit creative work in around a career. I’ve taken an online coaching class for creative folks who feel blocked. I’m reading and workshopping with The Artist’s Way. And once, last fall, I participated in an all-day write-a-thon whose goal was to produce sample fairy tales, folktales, and fables for a collection aimed at elementary classrooms.

That was an exhilarating nightmare. And it unclogged my writing pipes.

The setting was a room full of tables and laptops, and about twenty writers. Over the course of the day, each writer produced nine pieces, in thirty minute time blocks, on themes and subjects that were assigned.

For fairy tales, we had to retell a tale we remembered from our childhood in our own words--in thirty minutes. We had to tell one about a princess that started traditional and ended postmodern--in thirty minutes. We had to concoct a ghost story for the folklore section based on a tabloid headline we drew at random--in thirty minutes. You get the idea. Nine texts.

I do not envy the editors their job of clean-up and presentation. I am not proud of all those pieces; there is one, even that I would be truly mortified to see in print.  But the process of cranking out story after story really got my head in to a whole new space.

The experience was invaluable. For someone who doubted her ability to write creatively, I had nine texts to show for myself. Some had come in part from stories I knew, but some were utterly original—about subjects I had never considered. I learned that I had enough story-stuff in me to pull together when I needed it, AND if I needed new material, I could be counted on to produce it.

I had not written against a clock since my last grad school midterm, and then I knew what I had to say; it was just a matter of writing it down fast enough. This was an utterly different experience: making things up that I didn’t have a plan for--and making them presentable--was trying in ways I could not have predicted. It was physically exhausting also—the drive home from Los Angeles is a blur.

The journey to viewing myself as a creative writer is long and winding and not over, but I took some giant strides forward that day. It is my fervent hope that others don’t make it this hard on themselves, but I suspect many do. Is it our culture of productivity (despite being fraught with early death and stress-related ailments)? Some vestige of a Puritan work ethic that says we shouldn’t enjoy work too much? Just a personal fear of letting ourselves “play” as adults? Do we worry that an art career doesn’t come with a 401K?

It doesn’t matter at the moment. What matters is I’m kicking all of that to the curb. And whatever else I have been or am, now I am a writer too. And I’m finding my singing voice.

(The Artist's Way is by Julia Cameron, and there has recently been a 25th anniversary edition released.)

Context is Key, or Where’d I Leave My Chaucer Goggles?

So I changed my new mantra from Context is King to “Context is Key” because nothing that sweeping needs to be gendered, and because I really think it works like a key. I’m thinking about how we use the text to read the text, how some works teach us how to read them, how scenes and characters mean different things if they come after others and you’re cued to them, and how deep reading of an author or a work can give you a particular view of the world.

There’s a lot there, but it’s all connected.

As a grad student in Medieval Studies, I didn’t have to mess with theory very much. Most of it was written way after my stuff, and so only marginally applicable. Just like you can’t reach back and call Chaucer a feminist when he would have had no concept of what that meant, it’s not really fair to judge a medieval poem by a 20^th century theory.

But you can judge it by its own standards. I like the idea of using the text to view the text. Beowulf, for instance, offers a basic case to begin. The poem opens with a description of an ancient king, Scyld Scefing (or Shield Sheafson, if we modernized it), and some events of his life. His name is a train wreck, obviously--one that would have gotten him beaten up on Anglo-Saxon playgrounds--unless we read him like a mythic hero-king: one who provides both protection (he’s literally a shield) and sustenance (providing, for example, a sheaf of wheat) for his people. We get a brief biography, then he never comes up again, but he does set a standard from which we can judge Beowulf as a hero-king.

Other poets aren’t as brazen about giving directions to read their work, but they kind of do anyway. After reading Chaucer’s “Friar’s Tale,” where the devil refuses to claim a horse when its carter verbally damned it to hell--on the grounds he didn’t literally mean it--readers of the “Franklin’s Tale” are ready to criticize Arveragus for making his wife keep the little oath she made “in play” over her wedding oath, because even the devil recognizes intent—certainly her own husband should.

So some books teach us how to read them. By the end of a book, we’re keyed to subtleties the author couldn’t have made use of before, at least not to as great an effect.

But some authors also teach us how to read the world. After fifteen years of teaching Chaucer, I have learned to see humor in unconventional places, to look for patterns, and to judge intentions. Edmund Spenser has taught me to expect to find magic everywhere. Ovid has helped me view the world as interconnected and constantly changing, and to value change as refreshing, even rewarding. I think of this like putting on glasses in a process similar to when critics read from a particular theory’s “lens.” So if you need me, I’ll just be over here polishing my Chaucer glasses, trying to filter some sense out of the evening news.

The Dualists' Dilemma

I love how some ideas just keep getting reworked. We don’t outgrow fairy tales; we just repackage them. We recreate some of the same archetypal scenes (this is just so-and-so’s odyssey) and characters: he’s such a Casanova. Today I’m entranced by our idea that we are dual in nature—a mixture of good and evil, or a compound of body and soul.

Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde explores our good and evil natures, but not in the way the cartoons taught me. Tweety Bird got huge and scary and violent when his evil side came out, as did many others, but Stevenson’s Hyde was smaller than Jekyll—wiry, malnourished, wild. Jekyll came to understand that he had cultivated his good qualities, and thus his body was tall and strong; his evil side was purely evil, and he had quelled his evil side, not fed it. 

This is reflected in the Cherokee story about the grandfather who tells the boy there are two wolves inside each of us—a good wolf and a bad wolf. The boy asks which one is stronger, and his grandfather replies “The one you feed.”  Jekyll’s wolfish Hyde is in danger of growing when Jekyll sets him free and exercises him.

The popularity of Stevenson’s work in the 20^th century, from cartoons to films to Star Trek episodes means this idea struck a chord with our imagination. In the Star Trek episode, entitled “The Enemy Within” splits Captain Kirk in to his good and evil side, and complicates matters by making his good side really problematic. He can’t make decisions or lead effectively. The implication is that the “whole” Kirk has enough ego and chutzpah to step on toes if he needs to get something done. Of course it’s the original Star Trek, so the evil Kirk is a pleasure-seeking hedonist, drinking and chasing women (more aggressively than usual).  Different context, but same idea.

The other way we seem to split ourselves, and perhaps with an even longer literary (and philosophical) history is the Cartesian dualist division between the physical and the conscious, or the body and soul. This is ancient, of course, but it hasn’t left us for all our technology. It came up today in class, reading Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight. (Incidently, Calvino also explored the other dualism in The Cloven Viscount, where the titular hero gets blasted in to his good and bad sides by a cannonball, but today we were talking about matter and spirit.)

The nonexistent Knight is an empty suit of armor that walks and talks and rescues damsels, fueled, as he tells Charlemagne, by “will power… and faith in our holy cause” (7), which Charlemagne concedes is enough to get us all moving. This nonexistent knight is given a squire who is his opposite: a man who seems to be “all body” in the sense that he doesn’t know he exists, so he “becomes” everything he comes in contact with—ducks, pears, soup, and Charlemagne himself.

This novella is a thought experiment: what if we could separate our mind and body in to separate forms? What would a mind look like with no body? Nothing. He needs the armor to give him shape. What would a person be like with no core soul binding him to one identity? A person who seems to carry traces of all races and who, having no core identity of his own, borrows one from his immediate environment, which changes as he moves around. He’s not a duck at dinner time, only when he’s walking by the duck pond and dives in. He’s soup at dinner time, not knowing whether he should eat the soup, or feed the soup to a tree with a hole in it, or become the soup itself. He literally dives in to whatever surrounds him.

Why so many stories with binaries over the years? We have a long history of thinking of ourselves as composite, frequently of two parts. And is the real progress of the last century that we don’t anymore? That now we tend to think of ourselves in multiple parts or roles? Today my students discussed the idea of a Disco Ball theory of identity: we all have lots of different facets, not just two constituent parts. That idea could take us far afield from Jekyll and Hyde, more like boldly going where no one has gone before.

(Images from Shutterstock, Star Trek Season 1, Episode 5, and the Harvest/HBJ edition of The Nonexistent Knight)

Mystery Texts, Gaps in my Vast Fund of General Information, and the Case for Surrealism

This week’s “Mystery Text” in the Senior Symposium class was Julio Cortázar’s surreal short story, “Axolotl.” I love it. A man who discovers axolotls at the zoo in Paris swaps consciousness with one, and tells the process by which he finds himself trapped in the axolotl, as his former body walks away.

Students never guess the author—maybe once in twelve years, but not because they read it in our courses—just because they were cool and seeking out Latin American writers. And I give them credit if they guess Borges. He’s mid-20^th century Argentinian too, and he gets taught in our world lit classes. For these purposes, he’s close enough.

I have not studied either of them, though, really. I read one Borges story and one Cortázar story in a 20^th/21^st century fiction class in grad school that I took in the summer. I was a medievalist—what did I need the contemporary stuff for?

But over the years I have bought a dozen books by these two, and another half dozen by Alberto Manguel, another Argentinian (who read in the afternoons to Borges as a kid, when Borges was going blind). I don’t know if you can call a niche of literature wildly outside one’s specialty a hobby, but I do keep buying books.

So after ten years of using Cortázar as a Mystery Text (this is an exercise for our seniors that feels like a literature practical in the style of I. A. Richards, but with the twist of using what they deduce to assess our program’s effectiveness at teaching literary traditions) and giving a cheesy internet biography to help them contextualize Cortázar at the end of class, I found myself this time really responding to Cortázar the activist, Cortázar the anti-Peron exile, even Cortázar the Parisian ex-patriate.

I started looking for a biography in English.

Because I have plenty of time right now.

(This is false. I am right in the middle of winter quarter. I’m on a search committee and have been going in two extra days a week for three weeks meeting all the candidates for my search and another position. It’s midterms—exams are piling up, and so are Chaucer translations; my partner was out of town for four days; we’re getting a new roof. I don’t have time for extra, unrelated reading.) But I’m really ticked that I can’t find an English biography of a 20^th century Argentinian author.  

Someday I may stop being curious. Someday I may not chase down characters and authors and practice new skills and stand in awe at things I don’t understand. But today is not that day. Today I’m imagining the kind of man who could write the bizarre “The Night Face-Up” and the lyrical collection Save Twilight, who could leave his country forever on principle and live in another language and culture and hemisphere. What pushes us to explore the surreal faster than a frustrating reality? And how long will it take me to get up to reading speed in Spanish?

(Image pilfered from Wikipedia.)

A Hodge Podge of Small, Good Things

1: I started a Bullet Journal at the beginning of the year. In my head this is a sort of a mash-up of an art journal, a calendar, and a series of lists, so it appeals both to my creative side and my need for order and reminders. My normal mode of remembering is to write a list, so if I can keep all my lists in one place, I stand a better chance of not losing them, and if I can use stamps, markers, and/or washi tape, I feel like I’m playing, so this is Adulting Disguised as Play—always a good thing.

2: I also received a gift from a student today—just a small gesture, really, but one so thoughtful, personal, and entertaining as to be emblematic of all that is good in my career. I teach humans. I teach humans about books. I teach humans about books that entertain and instruct and challenge and provoke and affirm. It is a serious endeavor, one steeped in humanity, and a genuine site of connection to individuals and the world. And individuals are wonderful. Sometimes the world gets me down, but individuals are awesome.

This student gave me a rubber stamp that he had custom-made for me. It says “Never trust a vowel” in a lovely, crisp block of text. This is something I shout gleefully (but in all seriousness) in many of my classes, as I point out to students the words they know in various languages and traditions. If they’re translating Chaucer’s Middle English and get stuck on the word “holp,” I remind them to try other vowels, and most of the time they come to “help” on their own. Vowels are what change most readily (consider regional accents). I have joked in class that I write it so often on people’s translations, that I could use a stamp, and someone listened and acted.

3: Finally, a poem. I wrote it years ago, when my kids gave me some bug and I missed a dear friend’s wedding. In the throes of this miserable cold and flu season, it seems relevant again, and still a pipedream. I will never be Ironmom. I will always snuggle the sickie.

“A Resolution”

Someday I’ll learn not to

Comfort a sick child.

Not to welcome on to my lap,

In to my grembo

An oozing, seething

Bundle of germs.

When my son has a fever

I won’t rock him in the comfy chair

Legs over one armrest

Head on my heart.

When my daughter has a tummy ache

I won’t lay her on my stomach

Rubbing her belly

As if it were my own, like

Two spooning Buddhas, for luck.

When they cough

I’ll spin them away from me

Aiming them like guns at the world

Instead of pulling them close

Calming their spasms with

The beat of my heart

The strength of my arms.

I’ll be Ironmom.

I will never get sick again.